Metal Bundle

Rust 1

The Rust 1 library is an eclectic but deep collection of metallic percussion “instruments” recorded in a variety of natural environments. Some objects are roughly tuned to a musical pitch, while others are raw, jagged and purely percussive. This first volume focuses on classic small objects and found sounds, such as metal racks, paint cans, soda cans, magnetic balls, steel pipes, brass hardware, a musical saw and odd bits of furniture, along with large structures like mine shaft gates, steel tunnels, towering stairways and massive structural I-Beams. While a few of the instruments were recorded in one of our favorite large halls or our recording booths, many of these naturally captured sounds were recorded out in the real world, in a lot of uncontrolled and even noisy outdoor or public environments. But hey, when you're trying to capture something strange or new, you can't always micromanage everything around you. You may hear things like stray human voices, bird chirps, distant machinery, road noise, blowing wind or other random sounds hidden in the background of some samples. We consider that subtle coloring as all part of the character, flavor and authenticity unique to these instruments. We feel it's better to have variety than to aim for sterile perfection, in our humble point of view.

Each preset offers realtime control over every aspect of the sound, allowing you to shape note Attack and sample Offset to create gentle, ghostly pad-like sounds from even the harshest impacts. The Release control let’s you tighten the sound into a sharp staccato click or ping in one moment, or a long ringing sustain the next. Tuning is easy, with the Stepping and main Tune parameters. Our powerful Uberpeggiator allows complex, adaptive arpeggiations and you’ll find tempo-syncing resonant filter and volume LFOs build into nearly every preset. We’ve also included a parametric EQ and convolution reverb with over 50 room and FX impulses to choose from instantly.

Rust 2

Rust 2 is about what happens when people walk away. Rust is abandonment, amnesia and decay. Rust is the inevitable decline of our overly-mechanized world. Rust is to iron as the tree is to the seed. The stuff of dead stars, it is what becomes of us all and from where we have come. In Rust 2, we went a little deeper underground and just a little farther out of bounds. So maybe we bent a few little laws while bending a little iron, or maybe it’s all good clean fun. And maybe we took really nice gear to places where nice gear should be taken, to places that people don’t go anymore. We did what had to be done to get in, make a hell of a lot of noise and get out in one piece. This 2nd volume in our 3-part Rust series is dedicated to prepared metal percussion elements, focusing on darker elements and the most remote locales, often involving quite a bit of urban exploration. Some elements are tonal, while others are percussive or long chaotic cinematic-style effects. With over 3000 samples, Rust 2 covers 81 different "instrument" sets, including bunker blast door slams and creaks, massive cold war era tactical ballistic missile loading rack percussion, mechanical prison block cell doors, iron bathtubs, massive 6-story metal tower stairways, giant steel structural I-Beams, long aluminum rods, a 25-acre metal sculpture park and more.

We used a wide variety of drumsticks, mallets and hammers, along with bare hands and boots to beat the sound out of all manner of metallic objects, surfaces and structures for this library. We bled a little and sweated a lot, just adding a little of our own rust to the mix. But in the end, we put everything back where we found it. Back where nobody will probably ever bother to look again. We captured plenty of variety, velocity layering and round-robin depth.

Rust 3

Rust 3 is a true paradigm shift in metallic tuned and untuned kit percussion. This long-awaited third installment in our legendary Rust series explores a brand new way of bending this classic genre of found-sound percussion into compelling new creatively musical directions. Our first Rust library focused on tight nuanced hand, mallet and stick percussion in a mostly dry environment, from paint cans to dumpsters. Rust II leaped into big cinematic and unique environmental sounds, with army bunker blast shields, prison door slams, huge bronze sculptures. With this grand 3rd volume, we set out to conquer powerful bass and rich musical tone, recording a massive variety of surfaces, objects, oddities, apparatuses and custom contraptions very up-close in wide stereo to capture even the most subtle of resonances and overtones.

We aimed for a collection that would offer uniquely alternative drum kit concepts, richly complex tuned percussion, dramatic effects and stingers and a huge wealth of sustaining lead, pad and ambient instruments. We reached for crystalline highs and mind-melting lows. We wanted a library that could stand on it’s own, capable of producing limitless musical potential all by itself. With well over 100 unique sound sets, plus tons of sustaining and effect elements, covering a total spectrum of metallic flavors, this iron beast definitely delivers on that promise. This library is designed to be easy to use and inspiring to work with, with an incredible depth of sonic potential suitable for use in any musical and sound design genre.

Tuned Artillery

The Tuned Artillery library is a unique tuned and untuned metallic percussion library is based on dry and hall recordings of spent brass field artillery shell casings from the WWI and WWII eras, plus a few odd extra elements in the same vein – an Eastern Bloc infantry combat helmet and a couple of decommissioned modern hand grenades.

Artillery shells and military helmets actually have a long history in modern classical music in the hands of pioneers like Harry Partch throughout the mid and late 20th century. They're not at all uncommon to find in avant-garde classical and experimental music today, used both as untuned anvil-like striking instruments and pitched over a tuned key range. In both cases, the high-quality precision cast and machined brass shell casings produce deeply resonant and harmonically rich qualities, when struck on the sides, edges and base with mallets, hammers, sticks, brushes or bare hands.

This library features well over 3GB of content, including 3026 samples and 110 Kontakt presets, each with a powerful and artfully designed custom user interface. You'll find both tuned and untuned metal percussion elements, with a variety of useful articulations featuring up to 10 velocity layers and 12 round-robins per layer for each one. We've also included a deep bonus collection of hand-crafted ambiences and tonal pads that we created by manipulating the original source material. These soundscapes, drones and textures provide a perfect and quite organic accompaniment to the more traditional multi-sampled library material they were directly derived from. We've also included a range of automatable LFO, EQ, filter, custom convolution, reverb and arpeggiation systems to expand on the creative possibilities that this library offers.

Bronze Bin

The Bronze Bin library is a unique tuned and untuned metallic percussion instrument library, created using a common found object with a rather special tonal character. Bronze is the most popular metal used to create top-quality musical bells and cymbals. So, when we came across this little refuse receptacle of pure brazen bronze, we thought ‘What a waste!’ Not in the waste-basket sense of the word, but a waste of musical potential. Every edge, curve, face and angle of this bronze beauty creates amazingly complex and unique sounds, full of harmonics, overtones and even undertones. In much the same way art and practicality intersect in the conventional use of this bin, so do percussion and melody intersect creating an enormous palette from a single source. Producing soft bell-like tones to a raspy wash of colliding frequencies the Soundiron Bronze Bin is a truly unique tuned percussion instrument.

We recorded a variety of tuned and untuned percussion elements using fingers, mallets, and sticks, to bring out the full musicality of this improvised instrument. We then designed a whole host of custom ambiences, drones, pads, effects and other special presets to take it a step further. The resulting instrument collection is both humble and expansive, well-suited for a broad range of production application from experimental to mainstream.

Iron Throne

The Iron Throne library is a very, very eerie and dark collection of metallic percussive and semimelodic effects, ideal for use in horror and suspend scoring, sound design, trailer effects and post production, experimental and ambient music, or anything else you can think to do with it. The origins of the strange creation/discovery will remain a forbidden secret – even though we had a contest where over 130 people tried to guess its origins. What we can tell you is that we beat and played the hell out of it… or in to it, depending on how you look at it. We used bows, mallets, metal rods, rubber balls, fingers, fists, drum sticks, nylon, metal brushes, rasps and files water and earth to lift all manner of demon song from this contraption.

We used viola bows on various edges of the throne to create eerie melodic and dissonant tones. There are several types of bowed instrument sets included, including long sustains, medium length gliss effects, short staccato and spizzicato notes and tremelo sustain. There are a number of different kinds of mallet rub, brush, finger and comb effects to explore. The finger drabs, rubber ball and flat mallet rubs were created by dragging the edge of the mallets (or fingers) along various surfaces on the throne, in long arcs and lines. This causes it to resonate in a similar fashion to a gong when rubbed in the same manner. The mallet strikes were produced with wooden, felt and metal tipped mallets and sticks, to produce standard metal percussion sets. Generally, the results are atonal, but with pitch stepping/shifting, these instruments can be played semi-melodically.